


Stuck in the red

by Builder



Category: Titan AE (2000)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Moments, Sickfic, Vomiting, scene rewritten
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-17
Updated: 2017-10-17
Packaged: 2019-01-18 12:52:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12388464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Builder/pseuds/Builder
Summary: "Bring blankets.  And cold liquor.""What's that for?""Not for her.  For boy."“No, no, I don’t need…”  He feels drunk already.  Without Akima’s weight holding him to the ground, gravity seems to be losing hold on Cale.  His brain is floating untethered in his skull, and his stomach is edging upward toward his chest.___________________________________A re-imagining of the scene in Titan AE when Akima is shot and she and Cale flee to the drifter colony.  Just with more whump.





	Stuck in the red

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first try at Titan A.E. fic. It's definitely on the list of my favorite movies of all time, and I think there are some spectacular moments in the film that can be fleshed out with more lovely illness and raw emotion. Please let me know how this goes...
> 
> I am absolutely messing with the dialogue from the movie, so don't expect things to be exactly as they are in the film. The essence is still there, though...
> 
> Visit me on Tumblr @Builder051

 

 

Cale doesn’t have time to look down.  He needs to get her to safety, to someone who can help.  He can’t stand here, gazing into her deathly pale face and anxiously searching out life behind her closed eyes. 

 

Akima’s alive.  He knows it with the same surety that he now knows Korso was never a friend.  Like he knows the Titan is doomed to be chopped up and sold as scrounge.  But there’s no time to think about that either. Akima’s alive.  She’s tense in his arms, wrapping her willowy body around itself to protect the injured shoulder that’s currently jammed into Cale’s chest. 

 

“Come on, bring her over here.”  Someone’s inserting cold fingers under his elbow and guiding him away from the bridge, further onto the drifter colony. 

 

Cale suddenly struggles to keep pace with the brisk walk.  Adrenaline still courses through is veins, but with the lack of an obvious opponent to punch in the face, it’s all hitching breath and heart palpitations.  Cale does his best not to jostle Akima as he carries her.  He feels his heartbeat throbbing through his chest and into hers, then reverberating through her precipitously frail form. 

 

“Ok, yeah,” Cale mutters, somewhat to the growing crowd of helpful and curious drifters, but mostly toAkima. 

 

There’s an explosion of English and Thai chatter all around.  Cale’s brain feels like it’s fogging up from the inside, and he’s not sure who to focus on, or who’s even addressing him.  “Lay her down here.”

 

An older woman in a straw hat seems to be taking charge, pointing people in various directions.  Her wizened hand pushes Cale to bow forward and hover Akima over a bench.  “Whoah, hold on,” Cale says. Akima’s groaning in his arms, and he’s not ready to release her onto the hard surface. 

 

“Get blankets,” The woman is barking out.  “And cold liquor.”

 

“Wait, what’s that for?” Cale asks in a mixture of confusion and panic.  He thinks of ancient, stinging wound-washes, and Akima’s pain-streaked voice replays in his ears.  Drifter colonies aren’t known for holding the latest tech, but they have to have medical staff, healing instruments, probes at the very least. 

 

He keeps a sturdy grip around Akima’s torso and under her knees until the older woman shakes open a dingy grey blanket and directs a couple of men in coveralls to manhandle the wounded girl down onto it. 

 

“Not for her,” the woman says.  The peak of the woman’s pointed hat comes up a few inches below Cale’schin as she reaches for his hands.  It’s only now that Cale realizes they’re shaking badly.  “For you, boy.”

 

“No, no, I don’t need…”  He feels drunk already.  Without Akima’s weight holding him to the ground, gravity seems to be losing hold on Cale.  His brain is floating untethered in his skull, and his stomach is edging upward toward his chest. 

 

More people are bending over Akima.  One of them is dressed in a white coat.  A human doctor.  Calebreathes a sigh of relief, then blinks hard.  Two doctors.  No, four doctors.  He blinks again and sees only one.  Cale shakes his head, releasing a wave of pent up vertigo cascading down from his hairline.

 

Akima’s being lifted again, then carried down a hallway.  Just before she turns a corner and disappears, she locks eyes with Cale across the drifter colony’s cavernous room.  Her lips part, and she might be trying to whisper something, but she’s more than too far away for Cale to hear.

 

“Hey,” he murmurs, taking one step in the direction Akima’s going and stretching out his hand as if to grasp hers across the yards between them.  But then she’s gone.

 

Cale’s dizzy enough to fall over.  His heart’s still pounding, his breath won’t settle, the smell of rust fills his nose.  He stumbles back a few feet to the colony’s dented, dirty wall and braces his arm against it.  With his forehead in his elbow, Cale examines the toes of his boots, then the swash of dark stickiness across his black shirt.  Akima’s blood. 

 

Unexpected squeamishness sends a river of spit up under Cale’s tongue.  He swallows it frantically, but bile joins the surge, and all there’s time to do is lean forward and hold desperately to the wall as he retches. 

 

It only takes a few heaves to empty his stomach, but fruitless gags keep rising.  “Fuck,” Cale mutters under his breath.  He lightly bounces his forehead against the cold, hard wall.  Heat prickles in from his hands and feet, and the next wave of disgustingness moves in.  He’s going to pass out.

 

“Oh, fucking Christ,” Cale whispers.  He slides down the wall lets his tailbone hit the floor.  He drops his forehead to his knees and folds his arms over his head.  Cale sighs through the urge to throw up again and wills the sparkles around the edge of his vision to dissipate. 

 

“You sick?”  Cale looks up and almost falls over despite the fact that he’s sitting down.  The woman with the straw hat is back, peering at him from the other side of the puddle of vomit.  She’s clutching a bottle of beer in each hand.

 

“Um,” Cale says, then swallows hard to force down the urge to spill his nonexistent guts.

 

“Here.”  She sets the beers on the dusty floor with a clunk that reverberates in Cale’s head, then scampers away again. 

 

A second later, she rematerializes with a mop, and Cale tries not to inhale the scent of stomach acid mixing with bleach as she cleans up after him.  “You don’t have to,” he tries to tell her, but the woman shushes him.

 

“Just relax a minute,” she says.  Once the floor is cleared, she bends to pat Cale on the back and reclaim one of the beers.  “She’ll be ok.  You’ll be ok,” she whispers with the sort of maternal comfort and understanding Cale hasn’t felt in well over 15 years.

 

“Yeah,” he breathes back.  “Yeah.”  Cale’s still sighing to himself long after the woman is gone.

 

He thinks he might be finally finding relaxation when something hits him in the back of the head and bounces off the wall behind him.  The thing comes to stop beside the rattling beer bottle that, by some miracle, hasn’t spilled yet.  The thing hasn’t hit him hard enough to cause any damage, but Cale’s already aching head smarts from the impact.

 

“Hey,” he snaps hoarsely, scooping up the black-and-white patterned ball and sloppily chucking it back at the embarrassed-looking kid that apparently lobbed it at him in the first place. The kid catches the ball, then cowers behind a tall girl in work coveralls. 

 

“Sorry,” the girl says.  “It’s his favorite thing, you know?” 

 

“Sure,” Cale utters.

 

“It was our dad’s.  Whenever he’s playing with it, he imagines he’s in a big grass field.  Even though all that’s around here are rusty spaceship parts.”

 

“Yeah, well.  Gotta…have stuff to keep you going,” Cale replies.  His mind flicks back to Akima.  She has to live.  To be alright.  Because then, even without the Titan, he’ll have…something.  But losing the Titan…

 

The kids retreat away from him, and Cale tips his head back against the wall and shuts his eyes.  Time passes, though he’s not sure how much because the dull hum of the drifter colony’s engines is beginning to lull him into a sleepy daze.

 

There’s a soft shuffling, and someone slides down the wall beside him.  Cale peels his eyes open to seeAkima, wrapped in a blanket and perched tiredly at his shoulder.

 

“How long was I out?” she asks.

 

“Not long.  Couple hours,” Cale responds, making his best guess. 

 

She eyes the still-untouched bottle of beer sitting on the floor and poses, “You drinking?”

 

“Naw, more like __not__ drinking,” Cale says with chuckle of distaste for the beverage.  He turns the topic away from himself.  “How are you feeling?”

 

“I’m ok,” Akima says.  “How are you?  You don’t really look that good.”

 

“I’m ok,” Cale replies.  His body has calmed down considerably.  There’s just the lingering headache and tremor of exhaustion to contend with now, and it’s truly nothing, at least in comparison to being shot through the shoulder. 

 

“So that rumor about you barfing all over the floor is total falsehood?” Akima raises her eyebrows.  “And you’re ready to help me hunt down a microwave burrito?  I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”

 

Cale does feel like he should eat, but just the mention of heavy, greasy food has him shoving down nausea again.  He manages a weak, guilty smile.

 

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Akima says, returning the smile.  She gracefully steps up to her feet and extends a hand down to Cale.  They stroll down to a bank of windows and fall back into silence.  ThenAkima murmurs, “I’m really sorry.  About the Titan.”

 

Cale doesn’t look at her.  “I think we still have a chance to find it.”

 

“How?” Akima asks, attitude edging back into her voice.  “Korso’s got the map.  We have no ship…”

 

“Oh, we’ve got a ship,” Cale says, his eyes glued to an ancient Phoenix model balanced on top of a trash heap just outside the window.  “Bit of a fixer-upper, but you can fly it, right?”

 

“Oh, don’t worry, I can fly it,” Akima says with a laugh of bravado.

 

“Good.  ‘Cause we launch yesterday.”


End file.
